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Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of bookmarks/notes/snippets?

315 points by danaw ↗ HN
I’m curious as to the tools or techniques people use to keep track of things like bookmarks, snippets of code or text, etc.?

I’ve used a variety of tools (simple browser bookmarks, Pinboard, Evernote, a text file, etc) but have never been very happy with any of the solutions.

Anyone have great tools or methods of storing bits of info for later access?

I’m thinking something that at a minimum has:

- Search

- Tagging

- Support for different content types (links, text, video embeds, photos, etc)

- Also would be nice to have mobile app, browser extension, API, Zappier integration, etc

Any suggestions?

249 comments

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zabana
Personally I use pocket to keep track of my bookmarks. They provide both search and tagging functionalities and the app is very fast and intuitive to use.

I'm not sure if they integrate with zappier but I would be surprised if they didn't.

Tade0
I have a text file in Notepad - not even kidding.

For bookmarks I use whatever bookmark solution my browser provides.

My take is that it's rarely about the tool really and more about describing whatever you have there properly.

jpn
Sublime & Markdown.
urlwolf
Intellij and asciidoc, the plugin for it is excellent.
rookie101
I use vimwiki to keep a track of this. Its a plugin for vim and I've built a decent knowledge base in it. The plugin also provides html conversion, so Ive set a git hook that does this and uploads the html to my server for easy access from my phone.
marai2
Hacker News' "favorites" is now my bookmarking service :-) It's like a poor man's Del.icio.us. (It doesn't checkmark majority of the OP's boxes). But if your interests align with mine fp, ML, lisp then you may want to check out my favorites list. https://news.ycombinator.com/favorites?id=marai2
weinzierl
I'm the same. I often favourite posts I find noteworthy, useful or I want to revisit later. It's a pity you can't favourite with a single click from the list view (e.g. front page) or for comments from the thread view. I think, especially for comments, the favourite feature is hard to discover and inconvenient to use. Wish it would be easier so more people would use it because skimming through other peoples favourites is also an entertaining pasttime.
marai2
"pasttime" is a good description. On slow HN days when there is less interesting content to me on the front page I'll check out my favorites and then have an "holy cow! I have so many interesting articles I need to catch up on" moment :-)

What I would really like to do when I have some spare time is write a browser extension that will randomly inject a few of my favorite links into the HN frontpage for me so I can passively revisit these posts and discussions I've saved.

INTPenis
I use a combo of Google Keep, Taskwarrior, Firefox bookmarks, my blog and my mastodon account.

And of course I use features like Gitlab/Github stars.

It's just then a matter of remembering what you're looking for to know where to look.

hprotagonist
pinboard, mendeley, and a versioned org-mode notebook.
rwnspace
Obligatory mention of emacs+org. I've tried everything and anything, and it seems to be a common pattern that people with a streak of perfectionism go through a long journey of dissatisfaction with tools, a journey which seems to settle in emacs+org-mode for many.

I really, really like the combination of Joplin, the Joplin extension and Pocket. The export tools offered by the Joplin extension combine well with the readability processing/formatting that Pocket applies. You can save a markdown-version, save URLs only, the complete HTML of a page, or just some text you've selected.

I have some boilerplate HTML that adds spoilers and a couple other bits to make my rendered notes look nicer and help me study, along with a couple of templates for embedding YouTube videos, Spotify and Github Gists. Most of this is on the Joplin forums, I encourage you to take a look if that sounds appealing to you.

There's a mobile app, and Joplin exposes a REST API the extension uses - I have a few hacky scripts to help me use Joplin as a CMS for a website (still a messy WIP, might show this & the templates to HN soon).

I'm exploring Emacs & Org-mode right now since it pairs well with Haskell, which I'm learning during this whole lockdown thing - even with all my Joplin-based stuff I can see why people accept the trade-offs and buy into it completely. Now might be a good time to try emacs+org out, for those lucky ones just riding lockdown out at home.

8589934591
Orgmode from emacs. It is a text file, has tags, can embed photos (not sure about video). I think mobile app orgzly is there iirc.

Previously I have used textfiles for everything. Then I moved to vimwiki. Now I am currently using orgmode which I find amazing and versatile.

d0mine
Features I find useful in this context

- ace-link is great for opening visible links in a couple of keystrokes

- org-store-link for linking arbitrary places in various (possibly remote) files inside emacs

- org-agenda to generate various hierarchical/tags/other criteria views

- counsel-grep-or-swiper (with ripgrep) works well even for several years worth of notes without the need for explicit indexing

- org-attach manages attachements such as pdf files (copy/open/sync/etc) pdf-tools with a hydra enables convient reading, search of the files in emacs

- Org Babel for cleaning, querying data (among other things). Inline images work e.g., generated by emacs-jupyter

- OrgMobile for agenda views, pushing notes from mobile

lancesells
I switched to Notion a couple months back and it's been amazing for me. I've been able to consolidate my notes, my archives, my daily schedule, etc into one place. They don't have an API and I'm pretty much fine with that. Without the API I'm much more mindful of what's going into Notion and spending my time thinking about things instead of automating too many things to be able to keep up with.

But that's just my use case. I'm sure 99% of their users want an API.

alfonsodev
would you mind to ellaborate on how do you organise things in notion? I could use some ideas and inspiration thanks!
ulisesrmzroche
It’s the other way around. 1% or their users want an API, probably less
lancesells
True. 99% of their users on HN want an API. :)
satya71
Firefox Bookmarks and Zotero
m-p-3
Joplin [1] to take secure, E2EE notes stored in the cloud and markdown-formatted.

It also has a web browser addon for taking web snippets, and it even supports MermaidJS diagrams.

[1]: https://joplinapp.org

hoistbypetard
I use Joplin too, and like it. I have never heard of MermaidJS before. That looks really useful. Thanks for sharing it.

The other thing I really like about Joplin is the side-by-side markdown and formatted view. I've taken saving half-baked blog posts in Joplin until I'm ready to post them, and it's nice to be able to grab the markdown and dump it straight into hugo's markdown-ish files.

lordgrenville
Fellow Joplin user and I love it, but do you know of a better alternative to their search? I wish I could grep the raw files, but I think they're stored locally with some kind of encoding.
9wzYQbTYsAIc
Wiki.js is what I’m currently trying out as a way to manually capture things, but I use a combination of Diigo and Opera’s My Flow as my normal go-to.

I’ve been developing some thoughts around rolling my own database wrapped with a service api to be used by a custom application that pulls my data down from Diigo or Pocket, etc. and then stores it locally. It’d be nice to then build out wiki pages in some way from the local database.

In short, still haven’t found anything that meets all of your bullet points.

Groxx
A folder in dropbox, and Pinboard for bookmarks.

I mostly enter plaintext files by date and grep as needed. "tags" == "words in the file" for me, I make sure to stick a keyword somewhere if I really want to be able to find it by "tag". Related files go in folders named so they'll be adjacent to the file that references them. More specifics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22279802

Works on every system, syncs any way I want, and I expect it to still work decades from now.

Bookmarks tho are currently just in Pinboard (I should fix that), in part because I mostly don't organize them - I use full-text search with the archival account. I have a pretty good memory for "I know a thing exists with this phrase / a couple words, I just don't remember the name", so that covers the vast majority of my retrieval needs.

superkuh
A flat text file. I will never again use anything proprietary or even non-human readable. A single text file combined with search does everything. If you require multimedia then just put the path to where it is on disk as text.
rootusrootus
Same here. I've been using a 'notes' file since I first got into Unix back in the late 80s. I've kept with it ever since. I still haven't found something I like better. So portable, easily searchable and easy to manipulate with standard unix tools, etc.
jedberg
Do you use a mobile device to edit? How? That always seems to be my sticking point with text based methods. It’s not easy to modify with my phone.
solarkraft
Not only that - how do you do structure? I'm especially thinking about trees here, which is how most concepts seem to be presented the best.
Shinkirou
I store my text notes on Dropbox, using various subfolder layers. The android app allows both creation and editing of .txt files.
torvald
I self host Seafile. It has a simple and markdown friendly editor in its mobile app.
superkuh
How is text not easy to modify on your phone? If anything this is a problem with phones being terrible computers and not text files. But I don't see how anything I said about how I do it on a desktop computer does not apply also to phones.
RMPR
Plus the version control ^^
catalogia
I totally understand avoiding proprietary formats, but why write off non-human readable formats? I've been using sqlite for things like this. I figure sqlite is not going anywhere. And in the worst case scenario, if for some reason the software I use to interact with the sqlite db was no longer tenable, I could easily dump my data out of it into a text file.
solarkraft
How is your database structured? One table for everything? Something fancy? How do you use it?
catalogia
Nothing too fancy, the skeleton of the schema is basically just:

    Tags(tag_id, tag_name)
    Files(file_id, file_address)
    FileTags(file_id,tag_id)
That's for organizing files using tags. I can organize notes like this by either putting notes into many text files and tagging them, or by putting notes directly into the DB with another Notes table. I've prioritized the former, since many of my "notes" are actually photographs of whiteboards or other non-text data. Storing textual notes directly in the sqlite database works well too though.

To interact with the system, I threw together a quick emacs client and a GUI client. Nothing fancy or pretty yet, but functional enough for my day-to-day use.

superkuh
Bit flips and other errors kill or make non-flat formats only non-trivally accessible. Anything requiring programatic interpretation is fragile.
awinter-py
I'm in the same boat, but would be on the market for a lightweight tool that searches for hashtags in the file
superkuh
Every text editor has search. Tags are just words. If you put the text into the text file it is automatically a searchable "tag". If you want you can put some markup around it but it's really not needed.
awinter-py
fair point

only thing I can think of that I'd want that grepping doesn't provide is some ability to define multiline sections that get captured in a search

rovr138
I mean, grep will find content in those sections but won’t be limited to those.

To limit it, if you devote the first 3 lines to title, summary, tags

You could extract the first 3 lines of each file and grep those.

If not, if they have a prefix,

    title: 
    summary:
    tags:
You could grep those first then grep the output.

    grep -E ‘title:|summary:|tags:’ | grep ‘query’
A simple script can be built.
josephorjoe
I use a notes directory with multiple flat text files named in some brief but sensible way.

I alias a command ('showNotes') to open the directory in sublime and use sublime's search to search my text files or edit/add files as appropriate.

I use to just stick to plain text and code snippets but have started using markdown for newer notes.

inetsee
I'm using org-mode's link functionality to maintain a simple multi-file text wiki. I'm not an org-mode wizard, so I'm probably not using all the functionality available in org-mode, but it's enough for me.
johnchristopher
It won't work for some. I often need to remember charts, pictures, maps... I need a visual nudge or hint to quickly scan thing. I can't tag/annotate everything all the time.
bosie
do you edit the file on tablets/phones too? how do you handle multimedia on those devices?
sh87
> never again use anything proprietary or even non-human readable

100% agree with this. I have settled on a very lightly (headers and lists) formatted markdown file. I like how I can just click on bookmarked link from the rendered HTML file to load in the browser (vs. copy paste from text files).

I did write a script to parse this file to mark broken (non 200 response code) links but forgot about it till now. Time to fire it up again.

mohammedhdotio
I use my email/imap drafts !! Its on my encrypted server and synced to my email client and can access everything from any device.
blumomo
Apple users may want to check the note taking, hierarchical tagging, page scraping and very hacker friendly iOS and macOS app Bear: https://bear.app. I'm a paying customer but there's also a free version.
m_ke
Yeah I use it too and it has worked great. It's just markdown, the data is easy to export and the search works well so it's easy to find anything that I drop in there.

They also have a new alpha with an improved editor https://bear.app/alpha/

j-conn
Mind sharing what features in particular make it hacker friendly? By page scraping, do you mean how it fetches the page title when you paste a link, or have I been missing out on some awesome advanced feature?
blumomo
For me 3 things make it hacker friendly:

* it uses a markdown like syntax

* all syntactic characters (bold, italic, headline, tags, ...) are always displayed and not converted to rich text format (such as Slack does) while still applying the visual formatting. Like in a code editor, I see all characters which I type

* its underlying SQLite database is documented so that you can integrate/automate to your desire: https://bear.app/faq/Where%20are%20Bear's%20notes%20located/

j-conn
Very cool, thanks for elaborating! Looks like that alpha has an improved (github flavored) markdown implementation too
apexkid
Google keep.

I make one keep for each of my projects whether it is professional or personal. Even for daily tasks like shopping and keeping track of payments i make keep. I color code them according to category and have it as a chrome app and mobile app.

cl3misch
How do you "make one keep" for each project? Separate Google accounts?
dmortin
I don't know how he does it, but you can use tags for projects.
BrandoElFollito
What scares me with Keep is that there is no access to the notes beside the app.

I am a GSuite user so it would be nicely integrated with my workflow but I am afraid they will close it someday and I will lose them.

Their refusal to add an API is weird as well.

reidjs
iAWriter Saves files to markdown on iPhone and syncs across iCloud. I wish it could sync with google drive or dropbox, but it's the only good markdown editor I've used.
jspaetzel
Standard Notes. Simple, encrypted, open source, and has nice consistent apps on every platform.

https://standardnotes.org/

jspaetzel
I also use Google keep and google reminders when I need a reminder. Mainly because of the Google calendar integration which is great.
pling87
Diigo has been my go-to ever since delicio.us folded. You can add any number of tags to each link, and the tags are easily searchable. The interface is not cluttered by enormous graphics, so you can view a large number of items on each page. The browser plugin and mobile app are also rock solid.

Whenever I want to save a article for reading, I add the tag "readqueue", and next time I want to read something interesting, I just search for that tag. When I finish the article, I change the tag to "readDONEqueue". I also have a "watchqueue" for videos.

I use it so much that I even signed up for the paid plan - it's been incredibly useful and has saved me from bookmark hell these past five years.

jdr23bc
I use a folder with markdown notes & syncthing to sync them between my devices. I also run a cron job on my phone to regularly push them up to a private GitHub repo for online access.

Android - markor

PC - vscode / typora

Online - GitHub's editor & markdown viewer